Mixed Race Studies

Some anthropological characteristics of hybrid populations

The Eugenics Review
Volume 30, Number 1 (April 1938)
pages 21-31

J. C. Trevor, Leonard Darwin Research Fellow

It should be explained that “hybrid” is used here in its restricted zoological sense, viz. as relating to intraspecific rather than to interspecific crosses. The adjective “mixed,” though convenient, can be misleading, since there is no acceptable definition of what constitutes a “pure” human race. For the purposes of the present discussion, “hybrid” will be taken to apply to crosses between races comprised within different major divisions of mankind such as the “varieties” of Blumenbach and the main “groups” of Haddon, Hooton and other anthropological systematists…

..The nine hybrid series concerned in this paper may be briefly described as follows:

(1) Norfolk Islanders, 113 adult male and female subjects, the descendants of six mutineers of H.M.S. Bounty and from ten to twelve Polynesian women from Tahiti and possibly two of its neighbouring islands, measured and described by Shapiro (1929). They are compared with 153 male and female Society Islanders, whose measurements were taken by Handy and reduced by Shapiro, and with 6,975 “English” and 381 Oxfordfshire villagers, whose measurements were taken by Galton and by Buxton and Blackood, respectively, and reduced by the writer. The genealogical records of the Norfolk Islanders have been carefully kept since about 1790, and any influx of fresh blood invarably been noted.

(2) Half-Blood Sioux, 77 adult male subjects including some described as a quarter and others as three-quarters Indian, whose meaurements were taken by Boas and eight assistants and reduced by Sullivan (1920). European ancestry is said to be French, Scotch, English and Irish. They are compared with 540 full-blood Sioux, measured by the same observers, and with 727 “Old American” Whites, measured and described Hrdlicka (1925). Herskovits (1930) has provided several constants of variation for the last series, and the writer a few others.

(3) Ojibwa-Whites, 8o adult male subjects, principally from Minnesota, representing various degrees of intermixture between women and French and Scotch which has been “continuous and cumulative” since 1660. They are described by Jenks (1916) and have been compared with 24 full-blood Ojibwa (all that could be obtained) and with 100 Minnesota French and 50 Minnesota Scotch, also measured by them. The constants of variation of these four studies have been computed by the writer.

(4) Yucatecans, 88o adult male subjects, a product of intermixture between Spanish immigrants into Mexico and Maya Indians during a period of some 350 years, measured and described by Williams (1931). They are compared with 77 presumably unmixed Mayas, measured and described by Steggerda (1932b), and with 416 Andalusians measured and described by Hulse (1933), for stature, and 79 subjects from all parts of Spain, whose measurements were taken by Barras and reduced by Williams, for cephalic and facial characters.

(5) Jamaican “Browns,” 165 male and female subjects of mixed White and Negro ancestry from Jamaica, measured by Steggerda and described by Davenport and himself (1929). They are compared with one series of 100 Whites of British and German descent and with another of 105 full-blood Negroes, also measured by Steggerda, both coming from the island of Jamaica and its dependencies. The Whites cannot be said to represent ideal comparative material, and as a large proportion of immature subjects is included in all three series, means based on their absolute measurements would appear to be unreliable. Consequently only indices, which are less likely to be affected by possible growth changes, have been used in the present comparison. It is unfortunate that the means and constants of variation provided by Davenport and Steggerda were determined by very crude statistical methods and that mistakes also occur in their computation.

(6) American Negroes of Mixed Blood, 254 adult male subjects of European and Negro ancestry, principally from various parts of the United States, measured and described by Herskovits (1930). Genealogies were obtained from each subject, who was then classified with regard to the proportions of White and Negro ancestry he possessed, three main divisions being recognized: (i) more Negro than White, (ii) approximately equal amounts of Negro and White, and (iii) more White than Negro. The number of individuals in each of these divisions makes them, in general, adequate for separate statistical treatment. They are compared with an unmixed American Negro series of 109 individuals, also measured by Herskovits, and with Hrdlicka’s “Old Americans.”

(7) Boer-Hottentot Crosses (the so-called “Bastaards” of Rehoboth), 74 adult male subjects of six or seven generations of mixed Boer and Hottentot descent from South-West Africa, measured and described by Fischer (1913). Fischer, like Herskovits, divides his material into genealogical classes representing different proportions of Boer and Hottentot ancestry. None of these, however, is really large enough for statistical purposes, and the measurements have been pooled to form a general Bastaard series, which is compared with 74 Hottentots, measured by Schultze Jena (1928), and, in default of local Boers, with 70 Dutch, whose forbears come from the northern provinces of the Netherlands, measured and described by Steggerda (4932a). The general Bastaard constants of variation and those of the Hottentots have been computed by the writer.

(8) Kisar Mestizos, 132 adult male and female subjects of mixed Dutch and Indonesian ancestry from Kisar, a small island in the Sunda archipelago, some thirty-five miles east of Timor. They were measured and described by Rodenwaldt (1927), who ascribes their origin to the seventeenth century. The mestizos are divided by him into genealogical classes, but these are too small for satisfactory statistical analysis, and the material has again to be treated as a whole. For comparative purposes, 64 Kisarese, also measured by Rodenwaldt, and Steggerda’s Dutch are used.

(9) Anglo-Indians, “new style,” 145 adult male subjects of mixed European and Indian ancestry from Calcutta, whose measurements were taken by Annandale, first reduced by Mahalanobis (1922-31) and later, with the exclusion of some immature individuals, by the writer. There is almost a complete absence of reliable information concerning their origin and it has been found impossible to select suitable material from Indian senes for a comparison of means, though in view of their very complex racial antecedents they can be retained for the study of variability…

Read the entire article here.

Session 408: Haafu, mixed race studies and multicultural questions in Japan

AAS-ICAS Joint Conference
Association for Asian Studes (AAS)/International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)
2011-03-31 through 2011-04-03
Hawai’i Convention Center
Honolulu, Hawaii

Session Location and Time:
Room 316C
Saturday, 2011-04-02, 07:30-09:30 HAST (Local Time)

Organizer and Chair:

Koichi Iwabuchi
Waseda University, Japan

Discussant:

Hsiao-Chuan Hsia
Shih Hsin University, Taiwan (R.O.C.)

Mixed race studies has developed primarily in Euro-American contexts. It productively draws attention anew to the strategic and creative negotiations/resistance against racialized marginalization by the persons concerned, while being cautious not to reproduce an underlying essentialist conception of race. This panel will examine how the issues regarding “mixed race”—as now most commonly called “haafu”(half)—are articulated in the Japanese context. While racial mixing has long been (mostly negatively) discussed in Japan, with the increase in migration and international marriage, it has recently become more visible and more positively perceived than before. With a brief introduction of the genealogy of the terms such as “konketsu” (mixed blood) and “haafu” that refer to “mixed race” in Japan, this panel will analyze through three different cases (would-be) celebrities’ strategic uses of cultural capital associated with racial mixing for self-empowerment, their reception by the public and the (im)possibilities of deconstructing an exclusive notion of “Japanese-ness”. The panel will discuss how the racialized politics of inclusion/exclusion is distinctively highlighted in Japan, how the postcolonial questions are underscored by the (non-)whiteness of haafu and how studies of haafu/mixed race enhance critical engagement with multicultural questions in Japan. This panel also aims to discuss how comparative studies of mixed race can be developed in East Asian contexts, offering new insights into mixed race studies and advancing a theoretical reconsideration of notions such as race, hybridity and national identity.

Covered Bridgings: Japanese Enka and its Mixed-Blood African American Star

Christine R. Yano, Professor of Anthropology
University of Hawaii, Manoa

Jerome Charles White (“Jero”), 28-year old mixed-blood African American from Pittsburgh, debuted in February 2008 as Japan’s first black singer of enka (nostalgized ballads most popular with older adults; characterized as expressive of the “heart/soul of Japanese”). The raised eyebrows generated by his debut stemmed not only from the fact that a mixed-blood African American male in hip-hop clothing with street dance moves was populating a Japanese music stage, but more specifically, that this was an enka stage. This paper analyzes the discursive negotiations surrounding this mixed-blood figure by the Japanese music industry and public. The racialized justification given for Jero’s legitimacy as an enka singer lies in his Japanese grandmother and her love of enka; indeed, Jero, like many African Americans, is of mixed blood. Jero’s in-betweeness enacts racial, national, cultural, and generational bridgings: simultaneously African American, Japanese, and mixed blood, he sings Japanese songs of an older generation. Indeed, Jero’s tears are painted an ambiguously tinged shade of black mixings. Armed with song, tears, and mixed-blood pedigree, Jero performs national inscriptions of displacement that crucially and ironically position him as nothing less than a prodigal grandson.

Becoming “Haafu”: Japanese Brazilian Female Migrants and Their Racialized Bodies in Japan

Tamaki Watarai
Aichi Prefectural University, Japan

For a discussion about mixed race issues in Japan, I take up Japanese Brazilian female models or those who wish to engage in this profession. Although it’s common to be a mixed race in Brazil, Japanese Brazilian women who come to Japan as return migrants realize that their being “mestiça”, which means mixed race female in Portuguese, now can be valorized as “haafu” in the Japanese printed media. Here I would like to address the following questions: To be successful as “haafu” models, how do Japanese Brazilian women perform, appreciate or contest this racialized image? Are there any differences between being haafu and being mestiça? In the end, what does “haafu” mean to Japanese Brazilians, especially in terms of their transnational lives? By analyzing interviews with the models and modeling agencies and observations of beauty pageants in Brazilian community, I will discuss the complexity and uniqueness of the conception of “haafu”.

Mixed Race Oiran?: A Critical Analysis of Discourses of (Non-) Japaneseness

Sayuri Arai
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Based on a popular manga, and with the twist of a focus on the contemporary world of girls, combined with psychedelic colors, a Japanese film, Sakuran (2007), directed by Mika Ninagawa, depicts the lives of oiran [Japanese prostitutes] in the Edo era (1600-1867). The protagonist, an oiran named Kiyoha, is played by white-Japanese, mixed race actor, Anna Tsuchiya. The casting of Tsuchiya as a “Japanese” oiran was controversial, because by putting a mixed race actor in the role, the film challenges the dominant notion of Japaneseness in Japan. By conceptualizing the theoretical concepts of Japaneseness, whiteness, and haafu [mixed race Japanese people] within a Japanese context, this essay explores the discourses of Japaneseness as they circulate and relate to the mixed race actor cast as an oiran in the film. By analyzing the Internet posts on one of the largest film review websites, this study aims to understand and critique the ways in which discourses of (non-) Japaneseness are narrated contemporarily, as well as explore the ways in which Japanese identities are negotiated and constructed within popular discourses.

For more information, click here.

Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas

Texas Tech University Press
2003
256 pages
8.9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
Paper ISBN-10: 0896725162, ISBN-13: 978-0896725164

Kevin Mulroy, Associate University Librarian
University of California, Los Angeles

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, black runaways braved an escape from slavery in an unprecedented alliance with Seminole Indians in Florida. This is the story of the maroons’ ethnogenesis in Florida, their removal to the West, their role in the Texas Indian Wars, and the fate of their long quest for liberty and self-determination along both sides of the Rio Grande. Their tale is rich, colorful, and epic, stretching from the swamps of the Southeast to the desert Southwest. From a borderlands mosaic of slave hunters, corrupt Indian agents, Texas filibusters, Mexican revolutionaries, French invaders, Apache and Comanche raiders, frontier outlaws, lawmen, and Buffalo Soldiers, emerges a saga of enslavement, flight, exile, and ultimately freedom.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Florida Maroons
2. Emigrants from Indian Territory
3. Los Mascogos
4. The Seminole Negro Indian Scouts
5. Classifying Seminole Blacks
6. In Search of Home
7. Either Side of a Border
Notes
Bibliography
Index

A creolising South Africa? Mixing, hybridity, and creolisation: (re)imagining the South African experience

International Social Science Journal
Volume 58, Issue 187 (March 2006)
pages 165–176
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2451.2006.00600.x

Denis-Constant Martin [in French], Senior Research Fellow
Centre for International Research and Studies (CERI) of the National Foundation for Political Science (Paris)

The present state of South Africa’s society is the outcome of protracted processes of contacts and mixing, in the course of which people coming from different cultural areas blended and produced an original culture. More than three centuries of racism and apartheid have bequeathed representations in which South Africa is construed as an addition of different people, each with its own culture and language. Such representations do not take into account the interactions between them that produced what is today a mix that is impossible to disentangle. This article attempts to look at theories of métissage and creolisation that have been devised to analyse societies in South America and the West Indies and check whether they could contribute to producing a better understanding of the history of South Africa. Édouard Glissant’s [(1928-2011)] theories of métissage and creolisation, because they stress processes and relations, because they consider that creolisation is a continuous process, could be relevant to South Africa. However, the example of Brazil shows that re-imagining the past does not suffice to pacify memories of violence and segregation; it remains ineffective if it is not accompanied by economic and social policies aiming at redressing the inequalities inherited from this very past.

Read or purchase the article here.

Griqua Identity: A Bibliography

2010
47 pages

Allegra Louw, Librarian
African Studies Library
University of Cape Town

Introduction

Most scholars acknowledge that the origins of the Griqua people are rooted in the complex relationships between autochthonous KhoeSan, slaves, Africans and European settlers. Coupled with the intricacies that underpin the issue of Griqua identity—and often as equally contested—is the matter of terminology.

Christopher Saunders and Nicholas Southey describe the Griquas as

Pastoralists of Khoikhoi and mixed descent, initially known as Bastards or Basters, who left the Cape in the late 18th century under their first leader, Adam Kok 1 (c.1710-c.1795).

They explain the name “bastards” as

[The] term used in the 18th century for the offspring of mixed unions of whites with people of colour, most commonly Khoikhoi but also, less frequently, slaves.”

Even in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, issues of identity and ethnicity continue to dominate the literature of the Griqua people. As the South African social anthropologist, Linda Waldman, writes:

The Griqua comprise an extremely diverse category of South Africans. They are defined neither by geographical boundaries nor by cultural practices.

Waldman goes on to illustrate the complexities surrounding attempts to categorise the Griqua people by explaining how the Griqua have been described by some as a sub-category of the Coloured people, by others as either constituting a separate ethnic group, by others as not constituting a separate ethnic group, and by still others as a nation…

Read the entire bibliography here.

The Anti-Miscegenation History of the American Southwest, 1837 To 1970: Transforming Racial Ideology into Law

Cultural Dynamics
Volume 20, Number 3 (November 2008)
pages 279-318
DOI: 10.1177/0921374008096312

Martha Menchaca, Professor of Anthropology
University of Texas at Austin

This article proposes that a historical analysis of court cases and state statutes can be used to illustrate how racist ideologies were transformed into practice and used to legalize racism. To exemplify this argument, marriage prohibition laws in the United States Southwest from 1837 to 1970 are examined.  This analysis demonstrates that African Americans and Anglo Americans were not the only groups affected by anti-miscegenation legislation.  Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans were also profoundly affected and their respective histories contribute to a more indepth understanding of the policies and practices used by state governments and the courts to discriminate against people of color.  This article also reveals that most legal cases reaching state supreme courts in the Southwest involved Mexican Americans because their mixed racial heritage placed them in a legally ambiguous position.

…Afromestizos and the First Anti-Miscegenation Law in the American Southwest

The history of anti-miscegenation law in the American Southwest began after Texas obtained independence from Mexico in 1836. One year later, on 5 June 1837, the newly formed Republic became the first nation in the Southwest to prohibit people of different races from marrying freely (Marital Rights, art. 4670, 2466, in Paschal, 1878: 783). People of European blood and their descendants were prohibited from marrying Africans and their descendants. A racially mixed person could marry a White person if they had no African ancestors in the last three generations. If the law was broken, the White person was sentenced to two to five years in prison. Texan congressmen justified imprisonment by the seriousness of ‘the offense against public morals, decency, and chastity’ (Tex. Penal Code 386, in Paschal, 1878: 429).

Texas’s anti-miscegenation codes were part of the Republic’s larger body of racially discriminatory laws passed after independence. In 1836, Mexico’s liberal racial legislation was rescinded. Citizenship was no longer extended to all people and Mexico’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1829 was nullified. Only Anglo Americans and Mexicans who were not of African heritage were given citizenship (Cx. of the Repu. of Tex. 1836, art. 6, s. 6, in Laws of Tex., vol. 2, p. 1079). Slavery was also reinstated and freed Blacks who had been emancipated under Mexican law were returned to bondage…

Read or purchase the article here.

White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana

Rutgers University Press
May 1986
325 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-2088-9

Virginia Dominguez, Professor of Anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: The Legal Domain
  • 2. Defining the Racial Structure
  • 3. The Properties of Blood
• Part II: The Political Economy of Labeling
  • 4. Shaping a Creole Identity
  • 5. Racial Polarization
  • 6. Anatomy of the Creole Controversy
• Part III: Manipulating the Practice and the Practice of Manipulating
  • 7. The Criterion of Ancestry
  • 8. The Logic of Deduction
  • 9. Conclusion
• Appendix: Mayors of New Orleans and Governors of Louisiana
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

The tension between individual choice and social norm emerges as something of a false dichotomy, and might better be represented as a continued negotiation by actors of how to interpret the norms. … It allows us to see rules not merely as a set of constraints upon people, but as something that people actively manipulate to express a sense of their own position in the social world.

—Michael Herzfeld in American Ethnologist, 1982

A recent Louisiana case attracted widespread national attention. In the fall of 1982 Susie Phipps, age forty-eight, went to court to have herself declared white. The headline in the International Herald Tribune read: “Woman Challenges a Race Law: Look at Me, I’m White’; Despite Fair Skin, She is Labeled ‘Colored’ under Louisiana Statute Based on Genealogy” (October 5, 1982).’ In the December 3 People magazine, the headline read: “Raised White, a Louisiana Belle Challenges Race Records That Call Her “Colored.”‘ Even in a small North Carolina paper, the Durham Morning Herald, there was the story and the eye-catching headline: “Woman Files Suit, Says She Is White” (September 15, 1982).

The details of Susie Phipps s life arc noteworthy, but so is the form in which the “facts” were presented to the public. In each of the headlines quoted above, the papers hinted that there may be more than one basis for racial identification. The International Herald Tribune juxtaposed physical appearance to genealogy. People magazine found a contradiction in being raised white and being called colored. The Durham paper suggested a lack of agreement between self-identification and identification by others.

Recognition of the inexactitude of race continued in the body of each article. All report the State Bureau of Vital Statistics’ claim that she is legally colored because her great-great-great-great-grandmother was a Negress and a number of other an cestors mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons. They note, in addition, that the bureau rested its case on a 1970 Louisiana statute that made 1/32 “Negro blood” the dividing line between white and black. To put it in perspective, they informed the public that Louisiana law traditionally held that any trace of Negro ancestry was the basis for legal blackness.

Both People and the Tribune cited in some detail the expert testimony that anthropologist Munro Edmonson presented in court on Mrs. Phipps’s behalf. According to the Tribune, he testified that there is no such thing as a pure race, no way to determine what percentage of Negro blood Mrs. Phipps’s slave ancestor had and, thus, no way to determine what percentage black Susie Phipps is. In addition, the paper claimed Edmonson called the present law “nonsense” in an interview he granted outside the courtroom. According to People, he testified that the genealogy the bureau prepared to support its case was “impressive, [but that] it says nothing at all about Mrs. Phipps’ race.” He is quoted as saying that genes are “shuffled” before birth, making it at least theoretically possible for a child to inherit all his genes from just two grandparents. Then, as if to appeal to the public at large, the magazine went on to summarize parts of Edmonson’s testimony that, it said, might “elicit a barrage of vigorous objections”: that modern genetic studies show that blacks in the United States average 25 percent white genes and that whites average 5 percent black genes, and that by these statistics, using the 1/32 law, the entire native-born population of Louisiana would be considered black!

In the wording of these stories, there was a shade of cynicism or disbelief—insinuations that the concept of race contained in the 1970 statute and employed by the Bureau of Vital Statistics was out of date, unscientific, and yet encoded in the law. There were insinuations that this was an issue resurrected from the plaintiff’s zeal, after all, was matched by the bureau’s perseverance—and this in a country where for about a generation there had been official racial equality under the law. The Tribune reported that her story, ‘a story as old as the country, has elements of anthropology and sociology special to this region, and its message, here in 1982 America, is that it is still far better to be white than black.” It went on to say that the 1970 Louisiana statute in question “is the only one in the country that gives any equation for determining a person’s race.” “Elsewhere,” it continued, “race is simply a matter of what the parents tell the authorities to record on the birth certificate, with no questions asked.” The thrust of the argument was the same in the piece in People magazine: “Birth certificates in most states record race for purposes of identification, census, and public health. Most states, and the U.S. States Census Bureau, now follow a self-identification policy in registering race at birth. In Louisiana, however, a 1970 statute still on the books has snared Susie and thousands of others into racial classifications determined by- fractions. … In Susie’s case, . . . the state contended that other ancestors were mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons—outmoded/expressions denoting mixed blood (December 3, 1982, pp. 135-136; emphasis added). Months later, the New York Times reiterated the theme when it announced the repeal of the 1970 statute late in June 1983. It quoted the New Orleans state representative who wrote the law that replaces the 1970 statute, saying that the state legislature was moved to act “to reflect modern thinking” (June 26, 1983, sect. E, p. 41; emphasis added).

It is clear throughout the media coverage that the case hinges on competing and coexisting perceptions of the nature of racial identity: the possibility of purity, the arbitrariness of calculations, the nature of reproduction, and the mutability of the criteria of identity. But in and of themselves, thesedisputed points are not novel. After three decades of active struggle for equal civil rights, continued advances in human genetics that make talk of “blood” seem primitive or folklorish, and the publication of both scholarly manuscripts and popular books proclaiming the sociocultural basis of our concepts of race, a localized argument about one woman’s racial identity hardly seems newsworthy.

The twist, so to speak, in this case is not racial identity per se, but rather the role of law. Louisiana was singled out by the press because it had a statute with an “operative equation for the determination of race” (New York Times. June 26, 1983, sect. E, p. 41), not because it is the only state in which there are varied, often competing bases for racial identification. The issue became one of constitutionality. Did the 1970 statute infringe on the rights granted citizens by the United States Constitution? Is one of those rights the freedom to choose what one is?

The appealing question is also a nagging one. There is, to begin with, the semblance of a contradiction. To speak of “what one is” is to imply that some identities are fixed, given, unalterable. A change of phrasing makes this clearer. “Freedom to choose what one wants to be” would contain an implicit denial of the fixedness of identity in that it suggests that it might be possible to realize one’s wishes. “Freedom to choose what one is becoming” would convey a similar message. In this case, will and desire seem irrelevant, and extra-individual forces are patently evident in the very phrase “is becoming’; but the words openly assert a process of becoming. The activity would be continuous rather than completed. In both of these alternative forms, there is room for individual choice and action and, thus, room for conceptualizing freedom to choose one’s identity. But how, after all, can we possibly conceive of freedom of choice if we take identities as givens^ And if there is really no choice, how are we to interpret the legal granting of “choice”?

The United States Supreme Court has taken a pragmatic approach to this question in recent years. In 1944 (Korematsu v. United States. 323 U.S. 214)” and again in 1954 (Boiling v. Sharps. 347 U.S. 497), the Court argued that racial classifications must be subject to strict judicial scrutiny because they deny equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment. And in 1964 (McLaughlin v. Florida. 379 U.S. 184; Anderson v. Martin, 375 U.S. 399), it held that racial classification is “constitutionally suspect.” But in several more recent cases (cf. Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 [1969]; Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398 [ 1963]; Bates v. The Cityof Little Rock, 361 U.S. 516 [ i960]), the Court has sustained statutes that define racial categories when it has deemed such statutes necessary for the purpose of realizing compelling and constitutionally acceptable state interests (cf. Davis 1976: 199-200).

Clearly the civil rights movement of the 1960s increased sensitivity to the existence of prejudice and led to the identification of invidious discrimination. But the issue then was the granting of rights to blacks, not the granting of the right to be white or black. The former had compelling state interest but carried ironic implications. Protecting the rights of blacks required the maintenance of a system for distinguishing blacks from whites, even though the system had come into existence for the purpose of disenfranchising those identified as black.

To redress a legal injustice, then, the Court permits racial classification by institutions. The question is whether the Courts pragmatic concern of protecting the rights of a sector of the population that has historically been subjected to systematic discrimination infringes on the rights of individuals to opt not to be racially classified and to identify themselves racially according to their own criteria of classification…

Cosmopolitan or mongrel? Créolité, hybridity and ‘douglarisation’ in Trinidad

European Journal of Cultural Studies
Volume 2, Number 3 (September 1999)
pages 331-353
DOI: 10.1177/136754949900200303

Eve Stoddard, Dana Professor of Global Studies
St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York

Grant H. Cornwell, President
College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio

The article examines a Trinidadian calypso and its reception as a case study to weigh the discourses of hybridity, creolisation, and a local variant, ‘douglarisation’. In cultural studies discourse, ‘creolisation’ is often used synonymously with hybridization. However, it is a different metaphor, with a different genealogy, and is much more grounded in specific histories and places, namely the New World sites of plantation slavery. In Trinidad, the pejorative term ‘dougla‘ sigmfies the offspring of a union between persons of African and Indian ancestry, while ‘douglarisation’ denotes the contested processes of Afro- and Indo-Trinidadian interculturation. ‘Douglarisation’ can be read as a particular instance of both hybridity and creolisation, but with very different implications. We argue that hybridity and creolisation advance different political agendas, the former attentive to multiple roots and the latter to new connections.

Read or purchase the article here.

Estelusti Marginality: A Qualitative Examination of the Black Seminole

The Journal of Pan African Studies
Volume 2, Number 4 (June 2008)
pages 60-80

Ray Von Robertson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas

Approximately four years ago, I began collecting interview data with Black Seminoles/Estelusti in Oklahoma. My research focused on how the Black Seminoles negotiated their marginal status within the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and with nonfreedman Blacks. Using Weisberger’s (1992) marginality construct, I found that the Estelusti most often employed ‘poise’ to manage their state of ‘double ambivalence’. This study further explored the issue of Black Seminole marginality after their reintegration into the cultural group in 2003. My findings, while different in specifics, were generally consistent with those found a few years earlier. The Black Seminoles still appear to experience significant marginality and are not fully accepted by the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.

Read the entire article here.

2011 Southern Arizona Asian American & Pacific Islander Conference

“Reach, Inspire, Connect”
 
Pima Community College – West Campus
2202 West Anklam Road
Tucson, Arizona 85709
Saturday, 2011-03-19 from 08:00 to 14:00 MDT (Local Time)

Conference Program…

09:00-09:50 –  Session “A”

Workshop 4:  Mixed Race – A popular 2009 workshop returning this year.  The presenter will talk about how she and others grew up as mixed race children, how the experiences shaped her adult professional life, how to grow positively with the lessons learned, and how they integrate into society.

Presenter:  M. Craig, Japan-America Society of Tucson

For information, click here.